Posts Tagged ‘Bill Haley’

Just to demonstrate how wrong your (actually my) assumptions can be, I read on Wikipedia that the first version of his “Sappers at Work” was rejected as a “Futurist abortion” and he came up with a more figurative one, presumably based on the one hanging in the Tate Modern (Blackpaint 128).

Actually, Bomberg is rapidly becoming one of my heroes, for the following reasons:

I like his paintings.

His work, hung outside a gallery in Chelsea, frightened the horses that drew the 29 bus.

He was one of the most “brutally excluded” British artists ever – expelled from the Slade in 1913 for being too avant-garde, unable to get a teaching job at an art school after WW11 – Wikipedia doesn’t explain this, which is odd because his paintings by then were far more conventional, although brilliant.

He died in poverty.

Guston

Philip Guston was another artist who comes to mind as one who turned from abstraction to figurative painting around 1970. He was already an established and lionised figure of abstract expressionism and attracted deep hostility when he went figurative, rather like a jazz musician going “modern”, or Dylan going electric in 1966, was it?

Why the change? Politics seems to be the answer. with the Vietnam war in full swing, Nixon as president, the recent memory of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Guston felt he could no longer paint paintings about painting. Hence the change, the cartoon figures, the big boots, KKK hoods, cigarettes, seas of blood, Nixon’s bandaged leg, prick nose, testicle cheeks. The only thing which stayed similar, it seems to me, was the general “pinkness” of his paintings, pinks, reds and greys being distinctive (but by no means exclusive) in his abstracts.